Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (10 page)

The immigrants never approached these places, nor did they enter the more raucous vaudeville houses. If the greenhorns were to be entertained, Boris concluded, it would have to be in their own language, spoken onstage by their own
landsmen.
An impossibility, said the other tobacco workers. He didn't think so. For an idea had come to him one afternoon on his way home. Chester A. Arthur now occupied the White House. It was known that this Arthur had once defended a Negro woman in court. She had been insulted and abused on a streetcar. It followed that he would make sure America was good to other races as well. And thousands upon thousands of Jews lived in New York in peace and quiet, yes? Well, peace, anyway. It followed that they would be permitted to have their own theater in their own language.

So Boris went out to see Frank Wolf. Here was a man with prime requisites—a big spender with a generous heart. The owner and operator of a major tavern on the corner of Essex and Hester Streets, Wolf liked to show off. He was a fancy dresser; two diamond rings decorated his fingers, and other jewels glittered on his French cuffs. Yet he was an easy mark for charities, and when a poor Jew down on his luck stopped by to cadge a beer, he was always good for a handout. Boris had come to know Wolf well, not from hanging out at the saloon—thirteen-year-old Jewish boys had no place in there—but from the nearby Orthodox synagogue. The barman sat on the temple board; the youth sang in the choir on Friday nights.

Boris introduced him to Abe Golubok. Abe did a little Show and Tell with the poster and the letter. Wolf ran his own private poll, asking patrons whether they would pay for tickets to see a local Yiddish Theater. Nine times out of ten he received a positive answer. Wolf, always a betting man, backed up his interest with tickets and $300 for travel expenses. Abe sent them on to his brothers.

The bedraggled Golubok troupe, most of them amateurs from the ghettos of London, arrived a month later. Boris and Pinchas met them at Castle Garden and took them to a cheap rooming house on the Lower East Side. While they unpacked, Boris congratulated himself for playing the role of
shadkhn—
matchmaker—in this arrangement. Never short of
chutzpah,
he argued for renting Turn Hall on 4th Street and for hiring some local talent to fill out the company. Himself, for instance. The Goluboks could hardly refuse; Boris was the reason they
were here. With Wolf backing the venture, including costumes and rent, billboards went up, announcing a presentation of Abraham Goldfaden's operetta
Koldunye, or The Sorceress,
featuring the “international star Mirele Krantzfeld.” Sure enough, there was Boris's name in the program. He was cast as “Moishe, a pastry vendor.”

The group rehearsed at a building on Hester Street. The block, Boris remembered, “was besieged by people shoving to hear the singing. The speculators who had bought all the tickets for the first performance made good money. They didn't even know themselves how much to charge for a ticket, and the public paid whatever they asked.” Optimism filled the hall; failure was impossible to contemplate. The euphoria lasted about a week. Then a severe, thick-necked man (“half-Gentile but all Jewish,” in Boris's memorable phrase) stomped in. He demanded to see the manager of this Yiddish Theater. The actors looked at Boris. The visitor flashed a badge, wrote out an address, ordered the terrified youth to report to the Immigrant Committee at ten the following morning. He departed without another word.

Along with Leon and Myron Golubok, Boris appeared at the appointed hour. A secretary led them to a room where several older men sat at a long table. The most imperious of them looked the actors over and milked the pause before growling in German-accented Yiddish, “Are you the artists who are going to perform at Turn Hall?”

The trio swallowed hard and nodded.

“Is it true in the play you will perform there is a peddler named Hotzmach, and that this Hotzmach swindles a poor girl who buys needles from him?”

More nods.

“You came to America to portray Jewish thieves, Jewish swindlers? Which of you plays this Hotzmach?”

“I do,” Leon admitted.

“Young man, you should be ashamed. And in the same play that you are going to perform there is a scene in which an old Jewish woman, Grandma Yakhne, burns down a house and an entire family is killed. This is true?”

Leon attempted to answer, but the old man banged a hammer and spoke out in the manner of a judge. “You had better not perform your Yiddish play with Hotzmach and Grandma Yakhne. If you do not obey us, know that within twenty-four hours we will send you away from
America on a cattle-boat. We will send you back to where you belong. And now you may go.”

Thomashefsky and his friends left in misery. “We were barely able to drag ourselves to Wolf's saloon,” his memoir states. “We told Frank the entire story, especially about the threat that they would send us away from America on a boat. The saloon keeper guffawed. And when he told his customers the whole saloon burst into laughter. Only the three of us, poor greenhorns, did not laugh. We stood unhappily with tears in our eyes.”

Wolf comforted them. “You should also be laughing. No one can do anything to you here, not even the President of the United States. Keep rehearsing and preparing.” A withering smile accompanied his assurances. “Those committee-niks, like last year's snow. Put on your play and be successful!”

Simultaneously abashed and encouraged, the little troupe hired a choir of twenty singers and a twenty-four-piece orchestra. The Lower East Side had never seen, had never even heard of, such theatrical extravagance.
Koldunye
was the talk of the ghetto. On opening night Boris made his way through crowds surrounding Turn Hall. Above the throng were a group of men standing on a wagon—members of the Immigrant Committee. They were shouting and gesticulating angrily. Boris thought he heard his name, paused to get the rest of the sentence, and realized what was being said. The speakers were warning their listeners not to go into the theater. The show was nothing less than
a shanda far yidn—
a scandal for Jews. Boris turned his back on them and pushed into the hall.

Uniformed ushers awaited their final instructions from Frank Wolf, dressed in formal attire and assuming the air of an uptown impresario. Boris informed him of the fuss outside. Wolf dismissed it out of hand. “Thomashefskele,” he ordered, “go get dressed and make sure the performance will be good and that group will be about as threatening as the yowls of a cat.” People filed in and took their seats as Boris made his way to the dressing room. The first notes of the overture sounded. The actors took their places. Boris routinely counted heads and came up short. Mirele Krantzfeld, the female lead, was missing. He ran to her dressing room. It was dark. He knew that she lived nearby, signaled the orchestra to strike up the overture again, bolted out the door, and ran to her apartment. He found her with a cloth tied around her head.

His memoir describes the next few minutes: “ ‘Krantzfeld!' I yelled with all my strength. ‘What happened? We need to begin the performance—the orchestra is already playing the overture a second time! Why are you sitting there? Come on!’”

With extravagant gestures she wailed of distress—her head throbbed, her teeth hurt, her throat was sore. An appearance onstage was unthinkable; the great Krantzfeld could not go on unless she felt a hundred percent. “I spoke,” wrote Boris, “I yelled, I begged, but it didn't do any good. I left her to her headache and her toothache and ran back to the hall.” By now the attendees were stamping, whistling, demanding a show or their money back. Boris gave his colleagues the bad news. Before they could react, he bolted into the diva's dressing room, climbed into her clothes, and signaled for the curtain to rise. “The operetta began—the first Yiddish performance in America. I played Mirele's part. In the third act I changed into a boy's outfit and did a solo as Moyshe.”

Boris's resourceful debut saved the night, but it did not rescue the company. After witnessing the opening night hysteria, Wolf wanted out of show business. “You may do what you like,” he told the actors. “I can't devote myself any more to the theater. My business is a saloon. I wish everyone good luck!”

Without backing, and without Krantzfeld, the troupe folded. Boris considered himself luckier than the rest; he could go back to singing in the synagogue chorus for $5 a week. But even that was to be denied him. The old German from the Immigrant Committee also served on the board of the temple. Over Frank Wolf's objections he argued that such a disrespectful Yiddish
theaternik
would tarnish the Sabbath services. A majority of the committeemen agreed with him, and Boris was fired. As he was to learn from Wolf, this was not all the committee had done to him. Decades later, still embittered, he recalled their treachery. “Krantzfeld had received $300 from the Immigrant Committee not to come perform in the play, and they bought her husband a soda-water stand on the corner of Division and Bowery for having convinced his wife to betray us,
the artists.
”

As irrepressible as he was insolvent, young Thomashefsky scoured the neighborhood for a new angel. He found a well-to-do butcher who adored
Koldunye.
The meat man agreed to take Wolf's place. Boris found a run-down venue, the Bowery Garden, with three important features: an open floor, rows of chairs fastened to one another, and a
cheap rent. The owner warmed to the idea of weekend performances, but wanted to negotiate with someone more mature. Never mind, Boris assured him: “The actors trust me. They will do as I say.”

It was not an empty boast. So grateful were the performers that they allowed Boris to be impresario, director, and featured player. He let it be known that amateurs were welcome, and soon had all the male walk-ons he needed, then advertised for chorus girls and had his pick of the Lower East Side beauties. All were willing to work for free, as long as they could appear onstage before their friends and families. The one missing component was a resident playwright. This Thomashefsky found in one Israel Barsky, whose ambition ran far ahead of his talent. Barsky had some stage experience in Europe, but in America he made his living in sweatshops. The author's business card said it all:

The company's first presentation was Barsky's
The Madwoman.
Unlike all the works in the Goldfaden oeuvre, this melodrama took place in America. It set the style for hundreds of plays to follow. An affluent father forbids his daughter to marry an artist. Distraught, she begins talking to herself, sees visions, and is eventually confined to a madhouse. A standard folktale formulation occurs: rich man down, poor man up. The father loses his money and his sight, while the artist gains recognition and becomes a commercial and aesthetic success. He returns to town a wealthy man and marries the girl. She regains her sanity in time to hear her father, now reduced to beggary, singing below her window. She forgives the pitiable figure and allows him to live in her grand house, whereupon his sight returns. Curtain.

As one historian remarks, “
The Madwoman
was not much more absurd
than a half-dozen uptown melodramas on the boards that season.” One Broadway theater presented
Youth,
a play about the shenanigans of high society. Its best moments, the reviewers agreed, occurred during “the sailing of the troops and the battle scenes.” Other hits that year included the thrillers
The Strangler of Paris
and
Coney Island, or Little Ethel's Prayer.

In order to keep his audience interested, Boris had to change his repertoire frequently. That meant he needed another playwright to supplement Barsky's journeyman offerings. The nearest and cheapest one at hand was the elder Thomashefsky. Seated on the aisle, Boris's father had often griped in a stage whisper, “I can write better stuff than that.” Now Boris asked him to prove it. Pinchas sat down with a pad of paper and a sharp pencil and found that writing was as easy as talking. Within the next six months he turned out two plays,
Yankele, Young Scamp
and
Rothschild's Biography.
In the latter work Boris played Mayer, the founding Rothschild, first in his humble beginnings, and finally as the influential dynast. It was his first starring role.

As the youth was to learn, forget, and relearn, his greatest asset— animal magnetism—was also his severest liability. Now that the company had a place and a repertoire, Boris focused on a very young and very innocent chorine. Her family soon discovered the affair and raised such hell that the owner kicked out the troupe in the middle of the week. They were replaced by Chinese acrobats.

Undiscouraged, Boris went on the road, booking his company into a Newark, New Jersey, venue. Four people showed up. He moved on to Philadelphia, where a theater owner took his money but failed to inform him that the venue was in a neighborhood composed of Germans. The audience found that Yiddish was close to
Deutsch,
but not close enough. Attendees filed out, grumbling, during the first act. Thomashefsky and Co. returned to Manhattan and tried to recoup their fortunes in a hall over a saloon way east on Avenue D. To their dismay, a whorehouse was doing business on the floor above them; the words and music were extinguished by the noise of prostitutes and their enthusiastic clients.

With no money and no place of business, the troupe dispersed. Boris, who had avoided ordinary labor for so long, was forced to look for work in a familiar and loathed arena, the tobacco industry. He found a job in a Sweet Caporal factory on Hudson Street. He also found the Golubok brothers rolling cigars on the same assembly line.
The three were to stay in place until the spring of 1884. Then, out of nowhere, Boris was reprieved by a message from Michael Yomen, manager of the National Theater. He asked Thomashefsky to “come over and talk business.” The business under discussion was Yiddish Vaudeville. Trade had fallen off, summer was coming, and it occurred to him that light entertainment might turn a profit.